


Until The Snow Thaws

by corgasbord, Xairathan



Category: Fate/Grand Order, Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Hijikata and Chacha also briefly appear, Memory Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-09
Updated: 2020-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 08:22:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22174009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corgasbord/pseuds/corgasbord, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Xairathan/pseuds/Xairathan
Summary: Okita is summoned to a mountain where winter never ends—a place she's fairly certain she's never been before. She wonders why it is, then, that she wanders this space feeling like something is missing, and why the answer might lie with the Demon Archer who now refuses to look her in the eye.
Relationships: Oda Nobunaga | Archer/Okita Souji | Sakura Saber
Comments: 7
Kudos: 95





	Until The Snow Thaws

**Author's Note:**

> my girlfriend and i were discussing the concept of okita losing her memory after dying in battle, and we kinda wanted to see how it would play out in a way that allowed for closure, so... we decided to write it together! as a minor warning, it contains spoilers for the gudaguda 2 event, which we included with some tweaks to account for okita's memory loss.
> 
> please enjoy the fruits of our combined efforts!

Okita stands in the middle of her room, hands wound tight around her katana. One palms the cool lacquer, the other, the cotton wrapped around her sword’s hilt. Completely still, Okita’s eyes dart from side to side, checking her surroundings. She’s the only one in the room. No ghost or spirit materializes to challenge her. The only one with the code to Okita’s room is herself; no one else could have come or gone. She’s the only person who could be responsible for the peeled tangerine on the kotatsu.

Slowly, Okita advances. Her hands don’t leave her side. They cling to her sword as though its coolness beneath her fingers, its tangible weight, is the only thing keeping her from careening into depthless uncertainty. She peeled that tangerine, she thinks. The idea isn’t a hard one to grasp. Okita can faintly remember her confusion when Gudako had called her to the command room, trying to do two things at once with her hands. One had been tying her katana to her obi. The other must’ve been this.

Nearing the kotatsu, Okita sinks onto her knees. The pommel of her katana knocks against its edge, the metal’s chime-like ringing drawing Okita back to her senses. She fumbles with the sash around her waist; her katana hits the floor beside her. As she watches it fall, Okita feels her stomach plummeting with it. Something about this feels wrong. Something about her return. Either the silence or the tangerine. It would have to be one of those. It must be, or the alternative is to acknowledge that both of them are connected to the question that’s plagued Okita for the past few weeks, the question of Oda Nobunaga.

Nobunaga’s avoiding her. It’s nothing more than a guess, but it’s the one Okita is the most sure of. She has no other answer for why her fellow Servants look askance at her sitting alone in the mess hall, for why her Master’s gaze keeps sliding off of her, as if to glance at someone by Okita’s side. She knows the truth of it in the heaviness of Nobunaga’s tread, heard at length approaching down the corridor before pausing and hurrying another way (never mind how Okita knows what Nobunaga’s stride should sound like). What Okita can’t answer is why this is, why Nobunaga refuses to so much as look in her direction, why the name _Nobunaga_ feels strange and oddly heavy on Okita’s tongue when she inevitably answers with an _I don’t know._

Okita shakes her head, fighting to clear her mind. In her tired state, her doubts have grown past mere subconscious thought and slipped into her acknowledged reality. Such things wouldn’t normally bother her. The mission must have worn on her more than she’d realized—Okita’s frown deepens. Even in Chaldea, keeping up with simple and expected tasks proves difficult. Swallowing back the bitter heat rising in her chest, Okita moves towards the futon, reaching to pull the covers back. This kind of exhaustion is something she’s ridden out countless times before. It’s nothing sleep can’t chase away.

Okita lowers herself into the futon, arranging the covers around her shoulders. Already she can feel an alluring warmth tugging at her eyelids, pulling her deeper into a drowsy sort of haze. The lights above her blur, pure white melting into fluid gold, dripping orange at its fluttering edges. As Okita drifts off, the bleariness beneath her eyelids seeps out and joins the twisting light. It forms a mass of red and black; the warmth she feels is and isn’t the futon’s; the threads of reality quiver and twist, sucked into the tapestry of what might be Okita’s dream. It could only be a dream that whispers her name just so, stirring the glow around her into a frenzy, bringing Kyoto’s summer rains with it, burning hot as they fall upon Okita’s face.

* * *

_This futon is too big._

That’s the first thought to surface in Nobunaga’s first moments of wakefulness. The natural consequence of that thought can only be a reminder of the cause: the futon’s other occupant isn’t there. Of course she wouldn’t be, Nobunaga chides herself right after; she hasn’t been for a few weeks, and for good reason.

The remnants of the previous night’s sleep fade from Nobunaga’s mind just as the sleep sand that she scrubs from her eyelids. That’s for the better, too. She wonders how many sleeps she’ll need to have before the same scene leaves her mind for good, at last ceasing to torment her with the grimness of the reality that awaits after she’s seen it play out again and again and again. Okita is gone. She had watched Okita disappear in a cloud of gold dust, fading right from her arms with a bloody smile and a whisper of something Nobunaga couldn’t catch over her howl of grief.

Okita had died to protect her. In itself, this would be painful, but Servants are meant to be resurrected just as they are meant to die. Okita’s death had hurt, but not nearly as much as the question she’d asked upon her return.

_Do I know you?_

Perhaps they’d known each other too well. They’d fought together, spent their free time together. Nobunaga can even recall the look of flustered surprise that fell over Okita’s face when she’d first suggested they share a room. Sharing a room had become sharing a futon, and sharing a futon had become lying half on top of each other during periods of downtime for no reason beyond how they’d grown to like each other’s company.

Okita must have known Nobunaga well enough to realize how loved she’d been, even if Nobunaga would never dare say it. Nobunaga, in turn, knew Okita well enough to realize that all the love in the world wouldn’t sway her from her priorities. Okita had outright refused it, in fact—had pushed Nobunaga back by the shoulders the first time she went in for a kiss and told her that she couldn’t do that. To pledge herself to anything or anyone but a cause she’d chosen to die for would be a betrayal Okita couldn’t abide, a betrayal of none other than herself. As painful a truth as it had been to swallow past the lump in her throat, Nobunaga had done so gracefully.

What a lot of good that stubborn sense of duty did her. What a fool she’d been, to go and die for the very person she’d refused to give herself to. And what a fool Nobunaga is, too, to continue to mourn someone who will never remember her in a way that she’d never mourned the loss of her retainers.

She exhales and turns herself onto her side, limbs grazing the space that Okita would normally have filled. Her fingers curve at the tips as if on instinct, but clutch only sheets between them.

Perhaps she should’ve predicted this kind of outcome. Servants aren’t supposed to recall previous summonings to begin with; the fact that the two of them recognized each other from their first Grail War was already an anomaly. Okita had treated it as proof that their fates were intertwined from the beginning—a “destined connection,” she’d called it. Nobunaga thinks that to be nonsense now even more than she did back then. If they were meant to keep meeting in this transient space between life and death, Okita would surely have retained the memories they made in it together.

Her only consolation is that it might be for the best. It’s not the mere fact of Okita’s nature not allowing her to let anyone too close; it’s the fact that Nobunaga is not someone Okita should love to begin with. To approach her would be to draw Okita into perpetual conflict with Nobunaga, and subsequently, conflict with herself.

It was for that reason that when Okita had asked if they’d known each other, Nobunaga had forced a smile around the bitter taste lingering on her tongue and said, _It’s better that you don’t._

It’s for that reason, too, that when Nobunaga rolls out of the futon altogether after too many minutes to count, she reminds herself that for all intents and purposes, Okita truly is dead. The Okita she’d known had slipped right through her fingers like so much smoke, and the one who continues to fight in her stead is a different Okita, unburdened by the weight of Nobunaga’s affection.

She smooths the covers back into place before she leaves for the day with the same carefree smile as always. The futon is too big, but beyond that, all is as it should be.

* * *

Okita skids to a stop at the center of the battlefield, the white triangles on her haori’s sleeves blurring against the cloudless sky. Now, the crystalline moment distilled on the razor’s edge of her blade. Here, the heat of combat that Okita has loved so fiercely, so much that she’d wished to die submerged in it. She should be flying. Okita does not smile when she fights; the arc of her sword strikes does that for her, but the color of her haori and the delicate balance in her steps should be enough to carry her off into the sky.

Instead, Okita struggles to find purchase in the mud. Her sandals are no different, but her characteristic lightness is gone from her feet. Okita is grounded, anchored. Her technique is flawless; she’s the one at fault here.

It is always Okita that’s lacking. Always the illness in her chest, eager to weigh her down. Always the lingering sliver of doubt like a knife between Okita’s ribs, another agony she’s learned to live with.

From elsewhere on the battlefield comes a clamor of metallic crashing. Nobunaga’s laughter cuts clear above it all: wild, untamed, every bit fitting for the Demon King it emanates from. She cackles from atop the mound she’s built up as her high ground, made from the hundreds of mechanical Nobbus she’s shot down. Her rifles surround her in an aura of blazing gold, spiritrons and muzzle flashes reflecting off the bodies of her fallen imitations. Okita wrenches her eyes away, jaw setting with distaste. Again, she’d found her gaze drawn to Nobunaga. She’s nothing more than a distraction, Okita chides herself, and a very unwelcome one at that.

A similar flash of red calls Okita’s attention. This isn’t, Nobunaga, though: it’s her brother, making for the cover of the treeline, shouting something to his troops as he retreats. He’s only just begun to run. If they could catch him now, they could end this singularity. “Hijikata!” Okita shouts. A mere flick of her blade conveys everything that needs to be said. Hijikata draws his katana from the Nobbu he’s just cut down and sprints after Nobukatsu, Okita following tight on his heels. This is what she’s longed for, Okita tells herself. There could be nothing more natural to her than following Hijikata through the fray, two master swordsmen reaving down an army.

“I’ll cut him off from the forest,” Hijikata barks at her. “You keep him from breaking off.”

“Understood.”

Hijikata peels off, a small herd of haori-wearing Nobbus tumbling after him. Okita changes course, advancing on Nobukatsu at an angle. He’ll try to backtrack once he notices Hijikata, and if Okita does this right, he won’t notice he’s boxed in until it’s too late. Droplets of sweat work down the sides of Okita’s face, past her eyes and between her lips. In spite of her fatigue, her spirit sings with vigor. This is all she’s wanted of this second existence. Hijikata, the Shinsengumi, the hunt. The earth vanishing beneath her feet as she runs. The unspoken reassurance that she, Okita Souji, belongs to something greater and worthwhile—

Okita’s pace falters. The taste of salt upon her tongue turns to iron. It rises from her throat, dripping from her lips as she crashes to the ground, dirtying the clear blue and white of her haori with umber stains.

The world seems to turn around her. Okita takes it in as though through someone else’s eyes. It isn’t her that the enemy Servant turns towards, electricity crackling in upraised palms. It’s someone else that Hijikata is shouting at, ordering to their feet. Some unnamed samurai in the Shinsengumi haori is about to meet their death by lightning, but it isn’t Okita. Okita hadn’t died with the haori on her chest, but warm and tacky blood (that is the only way, it seems, that Okita can die).

Thunder rocks the ground nearby, but the lightning never comes. A thousand bullets slam into the enemy Servant, directed by Nobunaga’s gaze, a smoking rifle braced against her shoulder. Her crimson eyes gleam with unspeakable madness, an anger that looks more at home on Hijikata’s face, a terrible and selfish fury that speaks more of something to be lost than something to be taken.

Nobunaga fires off another volley, still advancing. She doesn’t stop until she’s standing over Okita, one leg on either side of hers, lowering her rifle while the rest dissipate alongside the Servant into a golden mist, carried off like so much smoke. It’s another long moment before Nobunaga remembers the gun in her hands and lets that go, too. Only then does she turn her eyes upon Okita, depthless and unreadable, strangely distant.

“I’m fine,” Okita says. Her chest is sore; her muscles ache from her uncontrolled fall, but she can still stand and fight. That’s what matters. She wipes her bloodied chin on her bracers, spitting at the taste of dirt. Still, Nobunaga doesn’t move, nor does she give Okita a reply. “Thanks,” Okita mutters begrudgingly. That’s what Nobunaga, ever boasting of her accomplishments, would want to hear.

But Nobunaga says instead, “It’s nothing. The mad dog you call your Vice-Commander would’ve done the same.”

Nobunaga steps awkwardly over Okita, and it’s as if she’s someone else entirely. It was not Nobunaga that had stood over Okita, because this is Nobunaga that she sees: grinning as she runs after her brother, shouting that Hijikata won’t get the credit for her brilliant tactical victory. It was someone else who’d shot those rifles. It would have to be— there’s no reason why Nobunaga would’ve cared to do that, nor for the angry tempest that had stirred beneath her fleetingly panicked expression.

A heated curse rises from near the trees. In the confusion, Nobukatsu’s vanished. Hijikata paces the treeline, katana held uselessly at his side, glancing into the forest as though to catch a glimpse of Nobukatsu fleeing.

Nobunaga’s abandoned the pursuit. She’s settled for cleaning up the battlefield, picking off stray mecha-Nobbus with her rifles from afar. The eerie echo of gunfire is the only sound that wafts along the dying wind. No triumphant shouts, no boisterous laughter, just this stretching quiet punctuated by the clanging of broken mecha-Nobbus and Nobunaga’s bullets. The sun flares across Okita’s vision as it follows Nobunaga, stalking between the shattered palisades. In its blinding glare, it becomes almost impossible to tell the hunter from her quarry, both moving with the same deliberation. The only difference is the rote crack of Nobunaga’s rifles, as erratic as Okita’s heartbeat.

* * *

When Nobunaga touches back down in Chaldea with the others, her expression is carefully poised. Constant war has hardened her, forced her to accept the losses handed to her ad nauseam. What irony it is that she exists now on a battlefield where she has to watch the same people die over and over again—though she can think of no irony as great nor as bitter as the fact of her brother’s second death, this time not at her hands, but due to circumstances outside of her control.

It’s almost a shame, she thinks. Almost. If she thinks of it as an “almost,” it’s easier to dismiss it as something else that simply isn’t worth thinking about, tucked where it belongs in the farthest reaches of her memories with all of the other things she could almost call regrets.

Even if she wanted to dwell on it, she doesn’t get the opportunity. A firm grip on her biceps tugs her out of the Command Room and into the quiet of the hallway, a grip she recognizes well enough to attempt to wrest her way out of it.

Okita lets go of her, watching her with a look that could almost be called forlorn. “I just wanted to say, um,” she starts, her eyes everywhere but on Nobunaga, “I don’t blame you, for any of that. And I know it must’ve been hard, so… you have my condolences.”

Nobunaga blinks. Okita’s speech is awkward, as if the words took effort to shape. It’s so awkward that a laugh bursts out of her in seconds, somewhere between surprise and genuine amusement.

“Condolences? You mean to _console_ me? Hah! That can’t be what you brought me out here for,” she snorts, drawing a finger beneath her eyelid, because she can think of nothing to call this situation but funny. The Okita who’d forgotten her, who’d spent their whole time in that warped Edo going on about how she didn’t care one way or the other about Nobunaga but they should at least ensure Chacha’s safety, now has the audacity to feign pity for her. “Pitying people you don’t like isn’t like you, Okita.”

The slight widening of Okita’s eyes tells Nobunaga of her mistake, but she’s not given a chance to correct it. Okita asks, “What do you mean it isn’t like me?”

“Well-”

“You- no, other people keep saying things like that. Things that make me think that I’ve been summoned here before, and that I did know you. I went to the kitchen the other day, and that other red Archer was in there, and he told me that it’s strange for me to show up there alone. I hadn’t encountered him in that place before.”

Nobunaga keeps her stare as passive as possible, but she can’t help flinching when both Okita’s hands grab for her biceps this time and squeeze hard enough to make her grimace.

“And! There was that thing you said just now, and, and- what was all of that earlier, huh? When you saved me.”

“I told you that your Vice-Commander would’ve done the same,” Nobunaga says, trying to brush Okita’s hands away all the while. She can feel the intensity of Okita’s stare even without meeting it, which she doesn’t intend to do. “Or really, most Servants would. We’re allies in this place, after all.”

“Then why does it feel like we were more than that?”

Nobunaga’s ensuing pause thickens the air between them, like the heavy moment just before the first line of rifle fire breaks. To say that they’d been more than that would be an understatement. She won’t admit to it, but Nobunaga knows that had been what drove her aim earlier. She knows why it is that the sight of Okita, prone on the dirt, had gripped her muscles with something like bloodlust. Her pulse roared in her ears almost as loud as the gunshots that rang out, driven not by the thrill of the hunt, but by how acutely she could feel Okita becoming formless in her hands all over again.

“Let go of me,” she says simply, tone cool as the edge of Okita’s blade.

Okita does, as if she’s just come to her senses. That determined glint doesn’t leave her eyes, though. She asks, “Why can’t you just tell me what we were, Nobunaga? It’s obviously affecting you, too. Don’t think that I don’t notice. When are you going to come clean?”

There is no easy answer to that question. Nobunaga knows, though, that for as long as she bears her legacy as the Demon King, as long as Okita binds herself to the Shinsengumi, they can’t become anything more than allies. Not again. Not when it will hurt them both.

She steps back and turns on her heel.

“Nobunaga-”

“Ask me again when the snow thaws,” Nobunaga says with a dismissive flick of her wrist. If Okita has any reply to that, Nobunaga doesn’t hear it; she’s already stepped back into the Command Room to flag down their Master.

The meaning of her words should have been clear enough, though. Okita would know as well as Nobunaga does that Chaldea exists in the midst of perpetual snowfall, seated on a mountain that sees no warmth. The snow around Chaldea will never thaw; likewise, the ice that Okita has unknowingly shielded her own heart with will never melt.

It is in this manner that Nobunaga, in the only way she knows how, protects them both: with a truth as immutable as the fact that they can never be together.

* * *

After all is said and done, Nobunaga would love nothing more than to collapse into her futon for the next few days. The only problem with that is the restlessness that drives her to stalk vexed circles around her own room, waiting for the same exhaustion that’s already washed over her mind to claim her body with it.

She could run a few rounds in the simulator, but she’s had more than her fill of gunfire for today. Besides, it’s not often that she’s used those training grounds on her own—but that’s a thought that she shakes off just as quickly as it came, refusing to entertain the idea of sparring with a partner as she’s always done before.

Maybe it would help if she had something to eat. If nothing else, the walk to the kitchen might be enough to clear her head on its own.

That’s how she ends up with a plastic container full of multicolored mochi, all swiped up haphazardly because as with anything else, dessert is first come, first serve. Some might call her snack etiquette rude; Nobunaga would simply argue that if there is any unmarked food in a communal eating space, it’s as good as free game.

It’s not until she’s halfway to her room and reaching into the container to eat a piece that she realizes just how many she took. She can eat a lot, but this is too much for even her to devour in one sitting. One might even say that it’s a portion more suited for two people than for one.

The steep dive her appetite takes is as sudden and unpleasant as the realization of her futon’s spaciousness. She was never meant to have all of this to herself. The Okita she knows would have scolded her for taking so much, then insisted that she have at least half of it. Nobunaga can already hear it: an argument that never happened, debating how she could split this between the two of them without forfeiting an entire half.

Nobunaga closes the lid and turns down a hallway that she knows won’t lead to her room, to knock on a door she knows is not her own.

“Oh, Auntie!” Chacha greets her, eyes bright as they settle on the container in Nobunaga’s hands. “What do you have there? Is it for Chacha?”

“Yeah, sure,” Nobunaga says, popping the top off and holding it out. “I accidentally took too many from the kitchen, so I thought, y’know what? Why not share some? I’m a generous Demon King, after all.”

“Really? Chacha thinks you can be pretty stingy,” Chacha says, even as she lifts the front folds of her dress to create a makeshift pouch for her spoils.

“Hey, I am not! I’m pragmatic,” Nobunaga says, brows furrowed. Chacha never did learn how to hold her tongue. “This is smart, too. You can share those with everyone else, so everyone wins.”

Chacha’s hand pauses halfway between her skirt and the tupperware. Her eyes narrow, not with the nosy curiosity of a child, but with the piercing scrutiny of a mother.

“Everyone else, hm? So there’s no one specific you want Chacha to bring these to.”

“Nope. Doesn’t make a difference to me what you do with them.”

“Is that so.” Chacha’s hand resumes its movements, depositing pieces of mochi in her dress. “Well, Chacha appreciates it, Auntie. As a special reward, she’ll give you some advice.” She leans closer, weight on the tips of her toes, as if to share a secret. “Lovers’ quarrels are easiest to handle if you nip them right in the bud.”

Nobunaga gawks. “What?!”

“Thanks again for the snacks!” Chacha says, already retreating with a little wave of her free hand. “Chacha will make sure they end up in the right place.”

“Just what the hell is that supposed to-”

Chacha’s door shuts, leaving Nobunaga with a half-empty container of mochi and questions yet unanswered. She scowls and pulls her fingers through her own hair, shakes them out when they’re met with a tangle. The nerve of that girl—were she not one of Nobunaga’s favored family members, she’d get a swift reprimand for being so presumptuous.

But Chacha doesn’t need to explain herself. Nobunaga already knows the answers to any questions she could’ve asked; she’s well aware of the implicit demand in Chacha’s statement. Chacha expects her to start speaking to Okita again. Chacha doesn’t know what happened to the two of them, because she wasn’t there. She must think it will be a fix as easy as snacks changing hands. She’s always been more of a romantic than Nobunaga could ever stomach.

With a huff, she marches back down the hall, her container lighter in her hands now but her chest as heavy as ever. The bite she tears out of a piece of mochi does nothing to alleviate that, sweet bean paste all but tasteless on her tongue. What a waste.

She hardly notices until she returns to her empty room that the container, too, is emptier than it should be. Chacha took more than half. In any other instance, Nobunaga might have been irritated by this. Now, she plops the container onto her low table with a snort and lets her body drop backwards into her sheets.

Maybe that, like everything else, was for the best.

* * *

Okita pauses at a fork in the hallways, teeth tugging at her bottom lip. She’s not lost; she knows well enough where all of Chaldea’s separate corridors lead. The question is one of which will be the emptiest, where Okita can be left to her thoughts without the risk of those thoughts stepping into her reality.

The surest place to go would be her room, if only Okita could stand it. It feels too large and too quiet, likely due to her days with the Shinsengumi. She refuses to think it’s in any part because of Nobunaga, and certainly not because of the untouched mochi still piled on her kotatsu.

It’s been a week, maybe two, since Chacha’s visit. The mochi’s long since hardened, but Okita can’t bring herself to throw it away. Just looking at it reminds her of Chacha inviting herself in, waltzing over to the kotatsu and dropping the hem of her dress, announcing her arrival with an avalanche of mochi. She looked every bit the precocious child that her appearance would have others believe, and Okita had bought it. She had forgotten that Chacha was also Yodo-dono, up until she’d turned strikingly piercing eyes upon Okita and said, in a voice that failed to match her stare, “Chacha has brought Okita some snacks! Auntie took too much from the mess hall, so she told Chacha to share the rest.”

Okita doesn’t remember what she’d said. She’d muttered some noncommittal reply, some hasty thanks, and helped Chacha stack the mochi up into a neat pyramid. The whole time, she hadn’t dared to meet Chacha’s eyes. She’d known all too well how she’d frozen at the merest mention of Nobunaga, her reaction growing steadily more pronounced with each occurrence. The thought of Nobunaga sparks a tightening in her chest akin to the strain before a coughing fit, and that’s not even the worst of it. No, that’s reserved for the air of familiarity that accompanies it: as though these racking pangs are something she’d come to terms with in a life that wasn’t hers.

That seems to be the answer to everything—this life Okita doesn’t know. She knows of it, for certain. There are things said to her in passing in the halls and on missions that she doesn’t remember telling her comrades. The red Archer who practically lives in the kitchen had to have learned Okita’s preferred type of dango from somewhere.

But the memories escape her. Sometimes Okita thinks she feels them, fluttering at the edges of her mind in the moments after waking from a vanished dream, slipping through her fingers like water. What’s lingered in her grasp: fragments of leaping orange, a guttural howl like that of a wounded animal. Buildings rising into the sky like the vertebrae of some massive fallen creature. Nothing of what she and Nobunaga might have been. Nothing of what might have driven Nobunaga away from her.

It could only be something she’d done; there is no other explanation. From what Okita’s seen of Nobunaga, she’s not the type to bear a grudge. Her anger flows mercurial, all hot air and burning-ember gazes, flaring quickly and then gone. What it might have took to earn Nobunaga’s lasting ire, Okita can only guess. No one else seems to know either; they look to Okita for answers that Okita seeks herself, and all Okita can do is offer up a smile that feels all at once practiced and natural upon her face.

She’d given Chacha that same smile at her departure, weathering a knowing, “Okita should talk to Auntie, when she has the time.” For a while, Okita had wondered what had driven the certainty in Chacha’s voice. Now she knows it to be nothing. If Nobunaga would have told Chacha anything, surely it would be that speaking to Okita is the last thing that she wants. That much was evident in the way she’d avoided Okita in the days after that singularity, using her brother’s lingering spirit as an excuse to keep to her quarters.

It would be one thing if it was Hijikata who refused to stand in Okita’s presence. She’d understand that—she had, after all, failed to abide by the first and most important law of the Shinsengumi. Though it hadn’t been any fault of her own, she’d left them behind; Kondo and Hijikata and her men. She’d grown so far removed from their affairs that news of Kondo’s death had failed to reach her on her deathbed in Edo. She’d never fulfilled her promise to Hijikata, to recover and take his side on the battlefield again. The weight of that failure wouldn’t have worn on her like this distance from Nobunaga has; it’s the same as the tightness in her chest, a blemish that Hijikata sees no fault in to forgive, trailing in Okita’s wake like an unacknowledged shadow.

Nobunaga is nowhere near as stern, though. She’d waved off Nobukatsu’s apologies, allowed Chacha to pilfer sweets off her plate. Nobunaga may revel in the thrill of fighting and bask in the atmosphere of bloody battle, but she is not needlessly cruel. She wouldn’t avoid Okita just to drive home a point. That could mean only one thing, that whatever Okita had done was enough to make Nobunaga want nothing to do with her, some crime far worse than the sting of betrayal following Okita from one life into this one.

The hiss of a sliding door sends ripples through Okita’s thoughts. Her shoulders rise defensively with her gaze, only to slump back down: it’s just Hijikata. Somehow, Okita’s feet have led her to the same place where her mind has wandered.

“Okita.” Hijikata says, eyebrows meeting sharply above his narrowed eyes. Okita stops short, frozen, just watching Hijikata. She knows what it means to be subjected to that stare, to have her thoughts so intimately picked apart as though she’d worn them in plain sight. For a long moment, Hijikata is silent. His jaw works carefully back and forth. He seems to be weighing something on his tongue. When he speaks, it’s not the admonishment that Okita had expected. It’s just a simple “Come inside,” and Hijikata stepping back into his room, his movements lithe but casual.

Okita hasn’t been in Hijikata’s room before. Her and Hijikata’s meetings are usually reserved for missions or the simulator, and rarely, Hijikata’s ventures to the kitchen for takuan. He’s kept the room simple and spartan; his haori and tasuki hang from a hook on the wall, opposite which he’s mounted a Shinsengumi flag. Hijikata centers himself at his kotatsu, eyeing Okita, oddly solemn.

“Something’s been bothering you,” Hijikata says. “Don’t bother trying to hide it; it’s obvious. You only look like that when something’s really on your mind.” Hijikata’s mouth thins, what might be a poor imitation of Okita’s expression. “So what is it?”

“I…” Okita hesitates just past the entrance, too uncertain to go further. She’s jolted into action by Hijikata, clearing his throat expectantly. He says nothing as Okita approaches the kotatsu and sits, legs crossed one over the other rather than tucked beneath her in the formal position. “I think… I did something to ruin a friendship. I don’t know what I did, though, or what it might’ve been.”

“What makes you think you’ve ruined it?” asks Hijikata. “Have they told you to your face not to speak to them?”

“No, but-”

“Then how can you be certain?”

“I- I just-” She can’t just say she simply _knows_ ; Hijikata had never much been a fan of instinct alone. Again, Okita withers beneath the steady scrutiny of another, unable to explain herself. How could she? Neither Chacha nor Hijikata would’ve known the Okita before her. To Chacha, this is Nobunaga being contrary; to Hijikata, it’s Okita complicating things with needless worrying.

“You only make this worse for yourself by not confronting them,” Hijikata sighs. “But that was always like you, wasn’t it? Thinking you’d be making a nuisance of yourself- for one of our best fighters, you always did have a low opinion of yourself.”

The usual gestures—a muttered apology, hanging her head—would only prove Hijikata right. Okita finds herself unable to move, her muscles tense and rigid, while Hijikata studies her. He turns his head, first one way, then the other. “Okita?” he prompts her. “You understand what I’m saying, don’t you?”

“I do,” Okita mumbles. “I- I guess I can try. I just don’t think it’ll end well.”

“But it would be an end,” says Hijikata. “Don’t think you’re fooling anyone by dancing around it. The more you keep walking in circles thinking to yourself, the worse you’ll make yourself feel.”

“I know.” All Hijikata’s saying is what Okita’s thought to herself beneath the covers of her futon at night, when restless thoughts keep her awake into the long morning hours. Somehow it’s different now, hearing it from Hijikata. No longer can she ignore the inevitability of Nobunaga; this will end the only way Okita’s imagined it could, with herself at Nobunaga’s doorstep, asking for an answer she knows will never come. At least, she thinks, that end would be definitive. Nobunaga has little patience for those who push her too far, and asking questions about a matter she’s washed her hands of can only draw her ire.

“Come here.” Hijikata gets to his feet, arms spread and gesturing towards Okita. Hijikata isn’t the type for hugs, but even he isn’t so cold as to send Okita from his room with such a stricken look on her face. Okita rises, presses herself into the warmth of Hijikata’s embrace. Here’s a fragment of something she’s missed for so long, a reminder of a home and a life she’d thought left behind. Here’s the gruff rumble of Hijikata’s voice and his heartbeat against Okita’s cheek, proof that both of them are alive, that Okita’s failure isn’t so permanent. Perhaps the same could be said of what had happened with Nobunaga.

The contact lasts only a handful of seconds. Usually it’s Hijikata who breaks off, but this time, he seems to linger. When Okita draws herself back, she finds only Hijikata’s head cocked to the side, appraising her. “Hm,” he says, folding his arms over his chest. “I understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Just now, you tilted your head down. It was like you were expecting someone shorter.” Hijikata nods, more for his own benefit than Okita’s. “And another thing. Back in that place; what did you call it? A singularity? When you collapsed, didn’t you find it strange how quickly Oda reached you?”

“I didn’t think about it,” Okita admits. After they’d returned, her thoughts had been occupied only by the sinking feeling of having to turn her blade on Hijikata, of trying to speak to Nobunaga if only to try and ease those pangs.

“She was moving even before you fell.” Hijikata’s mouth quivers with the faintest emergence of a smirk. “Jumped off her perch and almost fell over trying to run over to you in time. It was almost funny, given it was her.”

“Nobunaga…?”

“It’s her, isn’t it? That you’re talking about. Who else would it be?” scoffs Hijikata. “The way she looked at you that whole time- she was keeping an eye on you. Whatever it is that happened between you, it hasn’t stopped her from concerning herself with you. Say she needs to tell you what you did, or else tell you she never wants to see you again. That should get her to make up her mind.”

“I will,” Okita murmurs. She already knows what Nobunaga’s likely answer will be: denial or refusal, telling Okita not to make her repeat herself (but if Nobunaga had been as close to her as Hijikata suggests, then surely she’d know that Okita wouldn’t give up so easily).

Hijikata walks Okita to the door, seeing her through with a brusque, “Good luck.” Hijikata had never been much for luck, either, but Okita knows what he means. His faith rests not in any turn of fortune, but in Okita herself, and in whatever bond she’d had with Nobunaga. If anything of it still remains, of course Okita would be able to salvage it. She had, after all, been the heart of the Shinsengumi while she’d still had the strength to take the field with them.

“Thanks,” Okita says. Hijikata waves her off, the hiss of the sliding door closing masked by the ringing of Okita’s footsteps hurrying back the way she came. For once, her destination is clear. Nobunaga’s room is only a hall or two down from hers; it shouldn’t be too hard to find. As she walks, a familiar certainty returns to Okita’s stride. Where it’s come from, she can’t say for certain. What she does know is its rhythm, two long steps and one short one, as though she’s hurrying after some unseen figure, this sureness bearing her through the corridors towards a destination that some part of her already knows.

* * *

There’s a tear in Nobunaga’s cape. She had noticed it before now; it’s been there for weeks, a short line ripped several centimeters from the hem by the stray slash of a sword. She simply hasn’t done anything about it yet.

She could, if she wanted to. She knows how to sew. She was, after all, the one who stitched her uniforms together from scratch in the first place. There’s nothing stopping her save for the fact that she simply has no motivation to mend it.

Her fingers find that tear again as she hangs up her cap and mantle on a hook near her bedroom door. It’s a big enough gap for her to slide her hand into all the way, and so she does. It wiggles out of the other end, flexes contemplatively. Yes, she could fix it, she thinks. She could also shove her other hand into it and pull and pull until the fabric splits the rest of the way down to the edges. The hem is already a little worn from countless battles, faint fraying that she never bothered to fix because it’s hardly noticeable at first glance, anyway. She prides herself on keeping an orderly and dignified appearance, but what’s a little weathering? What’s something that she could point to and laughingly tell others of with her practiced smile, a reminder that her enemies can consider themselves lucky to damage even her clothing?

She withdraws her hand with a sigh. What a lazy excuse. The truth that she hates to admit to herself even now is that mending her clothing has been the last thing on her mind for a while.

A knock on her door pries her away from the temptation to dwell on it. She would almost be grateful for the distraction if the person standing on the other side were anyone but the very source of her troubles.

“You again,” she says. A part of her wants to shut the door, but the steel in Okita’s eyes, in the jut of her jaw, tells Nobunaga that she would be stopped. “What do you want, Okita?”

“You should know by now what I want.”

“Really?” Nobunaga scoffs. “If that’s what you came here for, you’re wasting both our time. There’s nothing between us that needs to be discussed. I’ll say that as many times as I need to.”

“Then I’ll ask as many times as I need to!” Okita takes a step forward, as if she means to intimidate Nobunaga with the measly height advantage she has. “If you won’t tell me what your issue with me is, then I’ll pester it out of you. Try to avoid me all you like, but I’m going to keep coming back, again and again, until you’re honest with me, Nobu!”

Something in Nobunaga’s chest seizes. _Nobu_ —even if her Master still calls her that, it’s not the same. She hasn’t heard that nickname from Okita’s lips in so long that she’d hardly realized how much she missed the way it sounded. She’d hardly realized how much she hated to think that she would never hear it again.

A fleeting sensation, warm like one that she wouldn’t dare call hope, unfurls between her ribs. For a moment, she wonders if this is why Okita has come to see her now. Perhaps her memories hadn’t disappeared completely with her death after all—

But then Okita’s brows furrow. Her gaze breaks from Nobunaga’s, trailing off to the side with a murmured, “Why did I say that?”

Reality returns to Nobunaga, heavy and stinging, as if she’d swallowed coal. Of course. How foolish of her to think, even for a second, that this is the Okita she remembers, the Okita who could remember her. It’s so foolish that she could almost laugh at herself, but her voice sticks to the wall of her throat, and she lets it. All the better that she doesn’t allow it to falter, now.

Her expression settles into something close to neutrality, but not quite. It’s enough that the hurt won’t reach her eyes, at least, but the corners of her mouth remain weighed down with what she tries to convince herself is sternness.

“Leave,” is all she says, poised to make her retreat.

“Wait!” Okita holds up both of her hands. “Nobunaga, please. I don’t know- I can’t remember anything that might’ve happened before I came here, but I know something is wrong. I know that something happened, at least, and I want to know what it is. I just…” Her arms fall to her sides, fingers curling into half-fists only to uncurl just as quickly. “Tell me what I did. Whatever it is, I want to try to make it better. I can’t do that if I don’t know.”

Nobunaga studies her. The tear in her mantle lingers in the corner of her mind: something she could close, if she wanted to. Something she could just as easily keep ripping open until the rift is too wide to bridge.

“There’s no reason for you to concern yourself with things that don’t matter,” she replies. With that, she pulls the door shut, fast enough that she only catches a glimpse of the distress that spreads over Okita’s face.

“Nobunaga- Nobunaga!” she hears again, accompanied by an almost frenzied pounding on the door. She ignores it, just as she ignores the faint tremor she catches in Okita’s voice and just as she ignores the way it makes her stomach twist. Nothing good will come out of answering such a call. As they say, what someone doesn’t know can’t hurt them.

She lingers by the door, leaned up close to it only long enough to listen for the fading shuffle of footsteps down the hall. Her ears tell her that it takes Okita a mere few minutes to give up. Good, Nobunaga thinks. That’s less of their time wasted.

A deep sigh falls out of her, but it doesn’t take the ache in her chest with it. That’s not something she can help, though. None of this can be helped.

Besides, this is all for the better. It’s for Okita’s own good. Okita will never thank her for it, but she won’t be hurt, and that’s what matters. Nobunaga is used to tasking herself with thankless endeavors, anyway.

She wonders why it is, then, that when she closes her eyes, all she can see is the pain that was swimming in Okita’s.

* * *

Nobunaga hasn’t visited the kitchen in a while. She’s had no reason to, not since that other red Archer scolded her for taking so much mochi. If she’s caught stealing snacks that are meant to be shared she’ll surely get another lecture, so it’s not worth the trouble. She much prefers the process of making tea to relax, anyway. She can drink a whole pot of that herself, so she can never say that she’s made too much.

Today is different. Today, the urge to stuff her stress with any kind of junk food propels her feet to the dining hall in motions more weary than she often allows herself to be.

It’s hardly been an hour since she last spoke to Okita, but she should’ve stopped thinking about that encounter by now. If it were any other inconvenience, she would’ve. She wonders what it must say about her, that she’s shaken off the sight of her brother’s body fading like dust on her cape, but the memory of what Okita’s heartbreak looks like still sticks fresh in her mind. Nothing good, she’d imagine—but then, she’s never cared much whether people have good things to say about her, anyway.

The emptiness of the kitchen is a small blessing. She would rather not encounter anyone who might ask her what she’s doing rooting around in the refrigerator right now, so close to when dinner is normally served. She imagines she’s a bit more disheveled than she’d like to be at the moment, and her temper is certainly more thin.

She opens the freezer next, stands on her toes and shoves an arm in to shift bags of ice and haphazardly stacked frozen dinners to the side. She’s hoping to find something easy to prepare. What her hand comes down upon instead is a tub of ice cream, which she jostles free of its lone corner and pulls out to get a better look at it.

Green tea—her favorite. She’d forgotten it was even there.

She tugs the lid back to find it a little over half-full. This should come as a pleasant surprise. Instead, Nobunaga can only stand there and stare into it as though the cold from the freezer had numbed her. She remembers the last time she’d tucked into this; she remembers that Okita had been the one to give it to her, but insisted that Nobunaga at least share a few bites. Nobunaga had relented, if only because Okita was always stubborn when it came to things she wanted.

What she had wanted then was much simpler than what she wants now, but she remains just as obstinate. Her obstinacy has little to do with pride, though. Pride wouldn’t cause such sad confusion to well in her eyes after being rejected.

Nobunaga takes a sharp breath of realization. It huffs back out as a laugh, short and bitter. There’s nothing funny about this situation, yet the noise comes out on instinct, melancholy in a way that doesn’t befit her. She could be nothing but melancholy to recognize the responsibility she bears here. If it were a burden left only to her, she could shoulder it, but Okita’s question remains in her head, as loud as if she’d just asked it. Okita’s sole demand for these past weeks has been to know what she did wrong.

“Ah…” Nobunaga leans against the refrigerator, cool metal to the side of her head. “To think that even I could be this much of a fool…”

She allows the moment to pass before she snaps the lid back onto the tub of ice cream. She knows the short answer to Okita’s question: she hasn’t done anything wrong. If either of them is to blame for that pain she’d seen in Okita, for the ache that sits heavy in her own heart, it’s Nobunaga herself.

How ironic. She’d been so dedicated to her effort to protect Okita that she hadn’t noticed the self-doubt she’d left to poison them both.

Nobunaga straightens, resolute, and carries herself out of the kitchen with her usual confident stride. She does not often believe herself to be in the wrong, but in this instance, it falls to her to make things right.

* * *

Winding windowless halls. The howl of the ever-present blizzard outside. Okita’s solitary, echoing footsteps. No destination in mind, just aimless wandering.

Nobunaga’s refusal to tell her what had happened.

The same things as ever.

Okita stutters to a stop around a corner, leaning heavily into the wall. Her fingers barely register the cool metal beneath them. Every part of her burns; her cheeks from frustration and her eyes from disappointment, her hands from banging on Nobunaga’s door and her chest from the tension there that refuses to abate. She’d meant to take another circuit around Chaldea to clear her head. All that’s done is solidified the sinking feeling in her gut into a heaviness that slows her stride. Try as she might, she can’t take her mind off Nobunaga. Okita can’t forget the way her face had fallen, the brief glimmer of hope in her eyes dying like an unfed spark. Again, Okita has wounded her. At least this time, she knows what it is she’s done.

“Nobu…” Okita’s whisper fights to escape the clenched tightness in her throat. She doesn’t know what to make of the name. It feels out of place in her mouth, short and unwieldy, with none of the cadence that _Nobunaga_ possesses. The relief it brings to the confusion wracking her soul is as brief as the sound of it hanging in the air, holding back the onslaught of Okita’s doubt for that fleeting moment.

Okita’s lips move to form her name again. They pause, tremble. Okita wrenches her eyes shut, shuddering against the wall. Her shoulder blades dig into it as she falters, falling into it, both hands rising to her mouth to catch the blood rupturing from her lungs. Again, the iron taste of shame floods her senses. In the pause between coughing and gasping for air, she wonders if it had perhaps been this weakness blossoming in her chest that had driven Nobunaga from her. It would make sense: after all, it was that same thing that had parted her from her brothers in life. It would only be natural for that same harsh reality to accompany her sickness, no less heavy and just as unshakeable.

Slowly, Okita lowers her hands. There’s still a faint quivering in her chest, but the worst of it has passed. Already the crimson on her palms is beginning to fade, tiny motes of gold drifting up and disappearing in the space before her eyes.

Then comes the rush of exhaustion that Okita knows follows these fits of coughing, tugging at her legs, beckoning her towards the ground. Even though there hall is empty, Okita refuses to succumb to it. She refuses to yield another defeat to her illness, even this miniscule one (not when she’s already lost Nobunaga).

But then, that wouldn’t explain what Hijikata had seen. If Nobunaga had truly abandoned her bond with Okita, she wouldn’t have run to Okita’s aid. She wouldn’t have let fury twist her face as she fired at the enemy Servant, nor lingered over her until she was certain Okita was strong enough to get to her feet.

Sighing, Okita presses her now-dried hand to her face. Again, she’s thinking too much of Nobunaga. If those thoughts have caught up to her even in the blank expanses of Chaldea’s halls, then it’s time for her to go home.

The journey back to her room is mercifully uneventful. It’s not until Okita shuffles up to her door that she realizes something is different. There’s a piece of paper stuck to it, a handful of characters scrawled on it in a scribble that makes Okita’s stomach do inexplicable flips. A moment later, Okita’s running back the other way, following the turns in the corridors towards the only place in Chaldea she hasn’t had reason to go. She leaves behind the paper and its unsigned message, a simple sentence: _Meet me outside._

* * *

Nobunaga’s out just past Chaldea’s doors, perched on a boulder with her legs swaying out over the ten-foot drop. She stops playing with the ice cream container in her hands (empty, from the way Nobunaga’s tossing it around), surveying Okita with her sharp gaze. It’s only another moment before she’s scrambling down the rock, tugging at the clasp by her neck, unfurling her cape to drape it lightly over Okita’s shoulders.

“What’s all this about?” Okita asks her. Nobunaga doesn’t answer right away, doesn’t give any indication of having heard her. She just tugs her cape tight around Okita’s body, only then stepping back with a scrape of her boots. Even then, she doesn’t speak. She seems to be content to listen to the howling of the storm around them, its biting cold held at bay by Nobunaga’s cape. Okita finds herself reaching up, winding her fingers in the fabric, taking in its latent warmth. Flickers of white pass through gaps in the hem of the cape; Okita is about to chide Nobunaga for them, if only to take her mind off the pleasant heat radiating towards the untouched hollow in her soul, when Nobunaga finally meets her eyes.

“So,” Nobunaga says, drawing out the sound. “Looks like I’ve gotta tell you now.”

“Tell me what?”

Nobunaga’s head twitches to the side, accompanied by the spreading of her arms. Her gaze drops to the ground beneath them: no longer frosted with brittle white, but gray, the snow melted down to the rocky face of the mountain that Chaldea’s built upon. Already the stone’s begun to regain its pristine coating, opaque silver gathering back into an icy carpet. Beyond the rock where Nobunaga had been sitting, the rest of the Antarctic ice remains untouched: it’s just this patch that’s been cleared, no doubt by Nobunaga’s fire, the remnants of which flutter like a second heartbeat against Okita’s body.

“I guess…” Nobunaga drawls. She’s back to staring out at the storm again. Even so, her voice is loud enough for Okita to hear her over the whipping of the wind, and steady as always. “I made a mistake, alright? So I’m here to fix it.”

To this, Okita has no answer. Nobunaga is not the type to so easily admit fault; it doesn’t take more than a few minutes at her side to understand that about her. Yet here they are, standing on an expanse of earth that should be an impossibility—would it be so hard for Okita to believe that here, of all places, is where Nobunaga might finally change her mind?

“I shouldn’t have kept you in the dark for this long, is what I’m saying,” Nobunaga mumbles. It seems she’s loathe to speak the words. They fall gracelessly from her lips to dash themselves upon the bared rocks. “I guess,” she says, drawing in another long breath, “I’m sorry. I thought I would be making this easier on both of us, but it looks like I was wrong, wasn’t I? See, I’m willing to admit my fault. Not like you and your stubborn pride-” Nobunaga trails off again, her voice fading with the crescendo of the storm around them.

Okita shuffles closer, hands still wound in Nobunaga’s cape. She doesn’t dare try and touch her, not just yet. “So I was right?” she asks. “That we used to know each other? That we were something more than just fellow Servants?”

“Yes.” For a moment, that’s all that Nobunaga says. That simple word has drawn too much out of her. The slant of her brow grows no less steep, but the fire in her eyes wavers, and her hands clench tight around something that Okita can only guess might be a memory. “We used to do everything together. We met in an earlier Grail War and kept our memories when we were summoned to Chaldea. We even used to share a room.”

“Then what happened?”

“I offered you the option of becoming something more, but you didn’t want to.” Nobunaga’s begun to pace, kicking up the snow at the edges of the melted circle. “Said it was something you could never do. ‘Okita Souji is a member of the Shinsengumi. How could I claim to be her if I let my loyalty be so easily swayed’? That’s what you said to me.” Nobunaga laughs, a hollow anger piercing through the veil of mirth. “And then you went ahead and got yourself killed for me.”

“For…”

“Does it matter how it happened?” Nobunaga bites the next question into the air, a puff of cloud escaping her mouth that might be her breath, that might be annoyance seeping from within her into her surroundings. Again, that clenching of her fists. Okita had always thought it to be Nobunaga grasping for the solidness of a rifle; she’d never imagined that it might be Nobunaga reaching for the last remnants of an Okita long since dwindled away into nothing. “All you need to know is that both of us made stupid choices that day.”

“I saved your life, and you call that stupid?” Okita says hotly. Instinctively, she reaches for Nobunaga’s shoulder; Nobunaga spins to the side, cleanly evading Okita’s hand, bringing the full brunt of her gaze to bear on Okita.

“Yes, because neither of us got anything from it!” Nobunaga glares at her, and the playful guise is gone. The Nobunaga who stands there is the same one from the false Toba-Fushimi in that last singularity, her smile riven into equal parts rage and frustration. Of course—if Okita’s life had been guided by honor, then Nobunaga’s is riddled with loss. Her mentor in Nagoya; her brother at Suemori; her wife and son at Honnouji. And then Okita, on some nondescript battlefield forgotten by history, nothing to remember her by but her lingering weight and a ghost with her face that walked Chaldea’s halls.

“And you didn’t come and find me after that?” Okita says. “You, the great Oda Nobunaga, didn’t take what you want for once?”

“I thought you’d be better off that way!” Now Nobunaga’s heat is unmistakable, forming a shimmering haze around her. She steps closer, abreast of Okita, matching with her fury what she lacks in height. But it’s unneeded; Okita’s deflated. She’s read Nobunaga wrong. Nobunaga’s selfishness isn’t tied to Okita’s presence, like she’d thought, but to her happiness. “I didn’t want to have to make you choose,” Nobunaga mutters. “If it was me or the cause you’d devoted your life to, I thought that’d be too cruel to ask you again.”

“So instead, you just didn’t tell me.” Okita fumbles with her scarf, tugging one end loose from under Nobunaga’s cape.

“I thought it’d be easier for you.”

Okita shakes her head. “It wasn’t. I ended up dreaming of you, and remembering bits and pieces of what we’d done. Never anything substantial- just enough to know something was missing.”

“Well, now you know.” Nobunaga shrugs, stepping back towards Chaldea. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Okita. Now you can stop bothering me about it, right?”

“That’s it?” Okita grabs for Nobunaga, this time getting a fistful of her coat. She tries not to mind too much how Nobunaga jerks to a stop, her body going rigid. “You’re not going to tell me anything else? Or say that we could be friends again?”

“Why would I?” Nobunaga says. “It’d just lead to that same choice being forced on you again.”

“But I’ve already chosen, haven’t I?” Okita keeps clinging to Nobunaga, refusing to let go. “If you really knew me that well, you’d know I don’t give up so easily on things I’ve put my mind to. I wanted to know what happened between us-”

“And now you do.”

“Don’t you get it, Nobu? I’ve already picked you. There’s too much missing from my life without you. Everyone keeps acting as if we’d never been apart. You can’t just expect me to turn my back on that and leave it all behind.” Okita’s fingers tighten over the shoulder seam of Nobunaga’s coat. Her eyes shine with her unspoken plea: _don’t leave me behind like the others did._

For the longest moment, both of them are still. Even the ice hanging in the air seems to slow as it passes near them. Finally, Nobunaga nods. It’s just the slightest dipping of her head, nearly imperceptible. Yet Okita knows—it’s as familiar to her as the sword on her hip or the ribbon in her hair. What comes next, she knows just as well: an embrace that draws Nobunaga up between her arms, that tucks her nose against the crown of Nobunaga’s head. If it seems a bit different, that’s just Nobunaga hiding her face in the crook of Okita’s arm and the sleeve of her haori, nestling into the fabric as though returning to her futon from a lengthy journey.

“Don’t do that again,” Nobunaga whispers, a hint of a rasp to her voice. “Doing something stupid like that, I mean. You know I’m fine with dying. I’ve talked about it all the time.”

“Nobu,” Okita says again. This time, the name feels less unwieldy leaving her. “It’s in the past. What’s the thing you always say? It can’t be helped?”

“You don’t get to say that to me,” protests Nobunaga. “Not when your whole hangup is on how you lived your life.”

In spite of her words, a glimmer of relief shines bright in Nobunaga’s eyes. When she steps back, disentangling herself from Okita’s arms, she doesn’t quite let go. Her hand stays wrapped around Okita’s wrist, gentle enough for Okita to break her grip.

Okita just says, “Do you think we can go inside now?”

“Ah, right.” Nobunaga tugs Okita towards the door, freshly-laid snow crunching beneath her boots. “We have been out here for a while now, huh? If you want, I’ll warm you up once you get back, how’s that sound?”

“To your room?” asks Okita. “Sounds to me like you just want someone to peel your tangerines for you.”

“You remember that?” Nobunaga laughs; she’s brash enough not to deny it. “Well, I didn’t expect to be caught this early.”

“I’ll do it for you on two conditions. Tell me everything from the beginning, and fix this cape of yours. Really.” Okita plucks at one of the edges as they pass back into Chaldea, gesturing at the ripped and fraying fabric. “All that free time, and you didn’t even mend these?”

“What can I say? I had other things on my mind.” Nobunaga’s fingers slide down to Okita’s palm. Unbidden, instinctively, Okita turns her hand to mesh with Nobunaga’s. What she could not hope to know is that the soaring feeling in her chest is mirrored in Nobunaga’s, that those words carry with them the same lilt that had once echoed through Chaldea’s halls. What she will know soon is the warmth and weight of Nobunaga’s head in her lap and the cramped space of her futon: not quite large enough to fit them both, just wide enough for their limbs to make some semblance of a tangled heap, Nobunaga’s warmth and Okita’s heartbeat resonating off each other and lulling themselves into a peaceful sleep.


End file.
